New rabbi for Mumbai Jewish centre attacked in 2008

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It was almost two years ago that Islamist militants attacked Mumbai and killed at least 166 people. Among them were six Jews, including Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka. Most non-Jewish readers probably had no idea what a Brooklyn-based Jewish couple was doing there. Many Jews would have known right away — they were running the Chabad House, one of a worldwide network of Jewish centres run by Chabad-Lubavitch, a Hasidic movement devoted to supporting Jewish life wherever it may be found.

The news angle to this story is that the Mumbai centre has a new rabbi, just in time for the High Holidays, as reported in my feature here. Rabbi Chanoch Gechtman arrived there recently with his wife Leiky to take up the challenge of filling Holtzberg’s shoes. “I still can’t quite fathom that they are not here, they were such extraordinary people,” he said in an email from Mumbai. After all the damage to the original building, they’ve moved to another building not far away, but the address is not advertised on their website for understandable reasons.

This could be a daunting assignment, but Gechtman, 25, seemed eager to get to work. “People really believe in this city. It’s a place with a lot of energy; it’s full of life,” he said. “There is really an endless amount of work to be accomplished. And the Holtzbergs set the bar very high.” The work is literally endless — a couple that goes out on an assignment like this is expected to stay permanently. The commitment for the “shluchim,” as these emissaries are called, is supposed to be for life. And it’s a job for both the rabbi and his wife. Running a Chabad House means offering services such as kosher Sabbath dinners, Torah classes, youth programmes, day care facilities, summer camps and women’s ritual baths. It’s an open house for any Jew who wants to participate — locals, expatriates or tourists passing through the city.

(Photo: Leiky and Chanoch Gechtman/Chabad.org)

“The Mumbai Jewish community definitely wants to move beyond 26/11. While we will obviously never forget what happened, we need to focus forward on helping the many people who need our assistance, so that Jewish life flourishes here,” Gechtman said.

On a recent visit to New York, I went to the world headquarters of Chabad-Lubavitch to find out more about this network, which has expanded dramatically over the past few decades. The Crown Heights section of Brooklyn seems an unlikely place for the world headquarters of anything, but the house at 770 Eastern Parkway has been Chabad’s base since 1940, when the then leader, Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, escaped from Nazi-occupied Poland. The last Chabad Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, worked there until his death in 1994. Chabad also has a large building next door.

Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin, the movement’s spokesman and director of its extensive Chabad.org website, told me the first emissary went to Morocco in 1951. The network grew both in the United States and abroad, popping up on American university campuses as well as increasingly far-flung foreign destinations. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the region where the Lubavitchers originally came from, opened up many new opportunities in Russia.

(Photo: Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters in Crown Heights)

Now, there are about 4,000 married couples working in around 3,500 institutions the movement runs in 77 countries around the world. Check out the directory of centres around the world here — it’s hard to say which location is the most far-flung or unlikely. How about Luang Prabang?

Author Profile

As Religion Editor based in Paris, I cover main religion developments, coordinate religion news coverage and run the FaithWorld blog. Since joining Reuters in 1977 in London, I've worked in Vienna, Geneva, Islamabad, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Bonn and Paris. My book Unchained Eagle: Germany after the Wall was published in 2000. In 2006, I received the European Religion Writer of the Year award and FaithWorld was awarded the RNA 2012 Best Online Section prize.